Transferring to iPod - Frustration!

[pancake]

Sorry if this question has been asked before! Is there any way to transcode files from apple lossless to compressed aac when I'm transferring from iTunes to iPod?

I've only just bought an iPod after my Rio Karma died. I used to use Red Chair's RIOrad explorer software to change files from flac to 128kbps wma on the fly & assumed I would be able to do the same with their Anapod version once I couldn't find a way of doing it in iTunes.

Am I the only person who wants to keep my music lossless on my pc (to use on my Sonos system) but compressed on my portable player????

[extremelydodgy]

You can do it via various ways. The ways I did it before I moved to the Mac (and abandoned plans to transcode on the fly / keep two libraries automatically in sync) are:


j.River Media Center. I can sum it up as Foobar for non-nerds. It won't encode AAC's when transcoding on the fly, but it will launch multiple instances of LAME to transcode OTF. The OTF can be specified in the portable sync preferences. The current version will launch up to 4 instances of LAME. If you have a dual-core (or in my case, a quad-core) system then you can cut the transcode time. It didn't actually work as well as I thought it might but it was a heck of a lot faster than doing it on a single-core CPU.


The other option is Sveta, which is the portable loader companion to dbPoweramp, the favourite file transcoder of many people. This will transcode on the fly to a whole bunch of formats including AAC - and it's also (AFAIK) currently the only piece of software to be able to transcode FLACs to Apple Lossless on the fly. I doubt it's useful for many, but Sveta also has other functions such as being able to rip songs directly to the iPod from CD without an intervening stage.

[pancake]

Thanks very much for the info - I was beginning to lose hope. I've already used dbpoweramp music converter to transcode all my FLAC files to ALAC on the pc, so I'll try the Sveta option.

Fingers crossed!!

[extremelydodgy]

Hope it works out for you. I found transcoding OTF in general like watching paint dry, and even with the Opteron 2 x dual-core powered transcoding in j.River I found it less than ideal.